SOBRE ESTE BLOG

I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.

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JVM-based languages have an interesting property for z/OS programmers: They are zAAP-eligible. As we all know zAAP Eligibility brings a number of benefits - including the licence charge benefits and the ability to run on a full-speed processor even when your general-purpose processors are subcapacity ones. (I'll briefly mention zAAP-on-zIIP here for completeness, and then move on.) You... [More]

The very first computer game I ever played was called Rhino and it ran on a Commodore PET. The school had been lent one for a fortnight. (I don't know why as we didn't go on to buy any, instead getting a single RML 380Z.) Imagine a character-grid screen where the rhino's are represented by pi symbols that chase you as you try to move from A to B. It was written in BASIC and allowed from 1 to 10... [More]

A need has arisen for pretty printing XML. This post includes some Python code to do it.
I've been working with the OpenOffice.org ODP presentation file format recently: I want to generate presentations from application code.
An ODP file is a structured zip file. Among other items it contains an XML file - content.xml - which describes the pages in the presentation.... [More]

In the distant past I've written about using DFSORT to parse XML. This post (and two follow-on posts) will describe
an experiment to make such processing much more robust.
In this post I'll talk about what the problem I'm trying to solve is. And why. And a brief outline of my solution.
About XML
This isn't meant to be the most detailed description of XML, nor a complete list... [More]

A while back I set myself a technical challenge: To learn how to program an Android device.
NOTE: I don't have a real application in mind, just idle curiosity and a degree of annoyance at the prerequisites to be able to program an iPhone (apart from as a WebApp).
Here's what I did and how I've got on:
My Equipment
I bought the cheapest Android tablet I could find. It's an... [More]

Here's another "For Beginners" post to encourage people to just leap in and try it... Javascript is a language popularly used for such things as web pages with some programming in them (and that includes frameworks like dojo), building Firefox extensions, and the Adobe AIR (desktop) runtime. As it happens I'm pretty familiar with Javascript anyway - having done all 3 of the above. This post shows... [More]

In this post (and any others in a similar vein) I'm going to be displaying a great deal of ignorance - but I think I'm doing it in a good cause. I know a fair amount about things like Java, XML and C++ - but NOT on z/OS. So I'm determined to learn and present what I learn as "For Beginners" posts here. The idea is that I'll encourage other people with more traditional z/OS skills to try some... [More]